Investigating the usability of real-time scheduling theory with the Cheddar project

This article deals with real-time critical systems modelling and verification. Real-time scheduling theory provides algebraic methods and algorithms in order to make timing constraints verifications of these systems. Nevertheless, many industrial projects do not perform analysis with real-time scheduling theory even if demand for use of this theory is large and the industrial application field is wide (avionics, aerospace, automotive, autonomous systems, …). The Cheddar project investigates why real-time scheduling theory is not used and how its usability can be increased. The project was launched at the University of Brest in 2002. In Lecture Notes on Computer Sciences, vol. 5026, pp. 240–253, 2008, we have presented a short overview of this project. This article is an extended presentation of the Cheddar project, its contributions and also its ongoing works.     

Using online simulation in Holonic manufacturing systems

This paper deals with the use of online simulation on Holonic manufacturing systems. Concepts needed for the use of online simulation in a classical hierarchical system were already defined, the observer being the central one. The behavior's differences between both classes of systems are studied to determine the best way to adapt these concepts to this new environment. In the product resource order staff approach (PROSA) reference architecture, staff holons were chosen to welcome the simulation models and the observer. An application on an industrial sized Holonic manufacturing system is described to demonstrate the validity of the approach.     

Formal Proofs of Rounding Error Bounds

Floating-point arithmetic is a very efficient solution to perform computations in the real field. However, it induces rounding errors making results computed in floating-point differ from what would be computed with reals. Although numerical analysis gives tools to bound such differences, the proofs involved can be painful, hence error prone. We thus investigate the ability of a proof assistant like Coq to mechanically check such proofs. We demonstrate two different results involving matrices, which are pervasive among numerical algorithms, and show that a large part of the development effort can be shared between them.     

Multi-contact vertical ladder climbing with an HRP-2 humanoid

We describe the research and the integration methods we developed to make the HRP-2 humanoid robot climb vertical industrial-norm ladders. We use our multi-contact planner and multi-objective closed-loop control formulated as a QP (quadratic program). First, a set of contacts to climb the ladder is planned off-line (automatically or by the user). These contacts are provided as an input for a finite state machine. The latter builds supplementary tasks that account for geometric uncertainties and specific grasps procedures to be added to the QP controller. The latter provides instant desired states in terms of joint accelerations and contact forces to be tracked by the embedded low-level motor controllers. Our trials revealed that hardware changes are necessary, and parts of software must be made more robust. Yet, we confirmed that HRP-2 has the kinematic and power capabilities to climb real industrial ladders, such as those found in nuclear power plants and large scale manufacturing factories (e.g. aircraft, shipyard) and construction sites.     

A Declarative Approach to Network Device Configuration Correctness

Configuration Logic (CL) is a formal language that allows a network engineer to express constraints in terms of the actual parameters found in the configuration of network devices. We present an efficient algorithm that can automatically check a pool of devices for conformance to a set of CL constraints; moreover, this algorithm can point to the part of the configuration responsible for the error when a constraint is violated. Contrary to other validation approaches that require dumping the configuration of the whole network to a central location in order to be verified, we also present an algorithm that analyzes the correct formulas and greatly helps reduce the amount of data that need to be transferred to that central location, pushing as much of the evaluation of the formula locally on each device. The procedure is also backwards-compatible, in such a way that a device that does not (or only partially) supports a local evaluation may simply return a subset or all of its configuration. These capabilities have been integrated into a network management tool called ValidMaker.     

Efficient filtering for the Resource-Cost AllDifferent constraint

This paper studies a family of optimization problems where a set of items, each requiring a possibly different amount of resource, must be assigned to different slots for which the price of the resource can vary. The objective is then to assign items such that the overall resource cost is minimized. Such problems arise commonly in domains such as production scheduling in the presence of fluctuating renewable energy costs or variants of the Travelling Salesman Problem. In Constraint Programming, this can be naturally modeled in two ways: (a) with a sum of element constraints; (b) with a MinimumAssignment constraint. Unfortunately the sum of element constraints obtains a weak filtering and the MinimumAssignment constraint does not scale well on large instances. This work proposes a third approach by introducing the ResourceCostAllDifferent constraint and an associated incremental and scalable filtering algorithm, running in \(\mathcal {O}(n \cdot m)\), where n is the number of unbound variables and m is the maximum domain size of unbound variables. Its goal is to compute the total cost in a scalable manner by dealing with the fact that all assignments must be different. We first evaluate the efficiency of the new filtering on a real industrial problem and then on the Product Matrix Travelling Salesman Problem, a special case of the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman Problem. The study shows experimentally that our approach generally outperforms the decomposition and the MinimumAssignment ones for the problems we considered.     

Tool path smoothing of a redundant machine: Application to Automated Fiber Placement

Automated Tape Laying and Fiber Placement of composite materials are the two principal automated processes used for fabrication of large composite structures in aeronautical industry. The aluminum parts produced by High Speed Machining tend to be replaced by carbon fiber composite parts realized with these processes. However, structural parts present reinforcement zones which disturb the tool path follow-up and generate an increase of the manufacturing time. Thus, this paper deals with the optimization of tool paths of a 7-axis machine tool of Fiber Placement with the objective of reducing the manufacturing time while ensuring the requested quality of the final part. In this paper, two complementary methods are detailed. The first method takes advantage of the degree of redundancy of the machine tool to decrease the kinematic loads of the control joints. The second method aims to smooth the orientation of the machine head along the tool path while ensuring quality constraints. These two methods are then applied on a test tool path and bring to a significant decrease of the manufacturing time (32.9%).     

Towards a continuous microfluidic rheometer

In a previous paper we presented a way to measure the rheological properties of complex fluids on a microfluidic chip (Guillot et al., Langmuir 22:6438, 2006). The principle of our method is to use parallel flows between two immiscible fluids as a pressure sensor. In fact, in a such flow, both fluids flow side by side and the size occupied by each fluid stream depends only on both flow rates and on both viscosities. We use this property to measure the viscosity of one fluid knowing the viscosity of the other one, both flow rates and the relative size of both streams in a cross-section. We showed that using a less viscous fluid as a reference fluid allows to define a mean shear rate with a low standard deviation in the other fluid. This method allows us to measure the flow curve of a fluid with less than 250 μL of fluid. In this paper we implement this principle in a fully automated set up which controls the flow rate, analyzes the picture and calculates the mean shear rate and the viscosity of the studied fluid. We present results obtained for Newtonian fluids and complex fluids using this set up and we compare our data with cone and plate rheometer measurements. By adding a mixing stage in the fluidic network we show how this set up can be used to characterize in a continuous way the evolution of the rheological properties as a function of the formulation composition. We illustrate this by measuring the rheological curve of four formulations of polyethylene oxide solution with only 1.3 mL of concentrated polyethylene oxide solution. This method could be very useful in screening processes where the viscosity range and the behavior of the fluid to an applied stress must be evaluated.     

Nonsmooth optimization for multiband frequency domain control design

Multiband frequency domain synthesis consists in the minimization of a finite family of closed-loop transfer functions on prescribed frequency intervals. This is an algorithmically difficult problem due to its inherent nonsmoothness and nonconvexity. We extend our previous work on nonsmooth H_∞ synthesis to develop a nonsmooth optimization technique to compute local solutions to multiband synthesis problems. The proposed method is shown to perform well on illustrative examples.